Being Sellers

Playwright Carl Caulfield's 1998 one-man show about Peter Sellers is being dusted off by actor David Boyle and director Simon Green for London's Waterloo East Theatre as part of Brits Off Broadway. But "Being Sellers" is short on the character insight its title promises, while being so self-referential that at times it borders on opacity.

We find Sellers lying in a hospital bed, bored and cranky, awaiting a routine exam. His stream-of-consciousness complaints about his life are punctuated by impatient cries for a nurse, who never comes. Just as you fear this format will continue for the duration, his heart monitor suddenly flatlines. Soon he hears his dead mother's voice urging him "to get here," though she offers no help with how. Sellers, Jewish on his mother's side but a graduate of Catholic schools, decides that he's in purgatory. This begins a surprisingly chronological attempt to justify his life, so he can get to heaven.

Caulfield's script attempts to illuminate Sellers' psyche through the characters he created as an actor. Unfortunately, what this leads to is whiplash as the peripatetic Boyle impersonates everyone from some early "Goon Show" personages to Chance the gardener from "Being There." Without an expert knowledge of Sellers' career, it's rarely clear what Caulfield is trying to say by linking that character to this issue in Sellers' life. To add to the confusion, Sellers also caricatures his fellow actors, including John Gielgud, Richard Burton, and Laurence Olivier. Green, who as a performer has charmed audiences two years running at Brits Off Broadway with his cabaret turns, hasn't required enough specificity from Boyle in his imitations, making matters worse. Sometimes by the time you've figured out who that was, the actor is already on to someone else.

The basic story of a lonely child of music-hall entertainers who finds international success through his crazy comic stylings but never achieves personal happiness will be familiar to anyone who saw Stephen Hopkins' excellent 2004 biopic "The Life and Death of Peter Sellers," starring Geoffrey Rush. This 55-minute monologue seems superfluous next to it.



Presented by Waterloo East Theatre, London, as part of Brits Off Broadway at 59E59 Theaters, 59 E. 59th St., NYC. Nov. 28–Dec. 12. Tue. and Wed., 7:30 p.m.; Thu. and Fri., 8:30 p.m.; Sat., 2:30 and 8:30 p.m.; Sun., 3:30 and 7:30 p.m. (212) 279-4200 or www.ticketcentral.com.